Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a condition that affects tens of millions of people in the United States and around the world. Obstructive sleep apnea typically occurs when a person's muscles relax during sleep, allowing soft tissue to obstruct the person's upper airway. As a result, the person is asleep but unable to breathe. This often causes the person to partially or completely awaken, at which point the person begins breathing normally and falls back asleep. The process can then repeat itself, possibly multiple times per hour. This condition interferes with the person's sleep patterns and can lead to a whole host of medical problems.
One conventional approach for identifying obstructive sleep apnea involves polysomnography, also known as a sleep study. Unfortunately, polysomnography is typically expensive, time consuming, and cumbersome to perform, so compliance and follow-through are often low. Another conventional approach for identifying obstructive sleep apnea involves home monitoring. However, this approach therefore uses indirect measurements of characteristics such as oxygen saturation and externally-monitored snoring, so it often has low specificity.